Faxing and PCI (was Re: [Asterisk-Users] Digium cards, so disappointing !)

[Kevin P. Fleming]

Jeff Gustafson wrote:

> 	I was looking at using a Dell server for running Asterisk and noticed
> that Dell has started using PCI-X on a lot of their new systems.  Does
> this newer bus standard help the situation with faxing?  

No. PCI-X is just a wider/higher-speed version of PCI, not a new bus.

> 	Will Digium offer cards that support the new bus? 

All of our cards work in PCI-X slots, but none of them take advantage of
64-bit slots or speeds higher than 33MHz.

> 	What about a new line of Digium cards that have bridge cables that run
> between the various cards and bypass the PCI bus?  Since one of the best
> aspects of using Asterisk is standards.  This bridge cable should be
> standardized and published so that other companies can adopt the
> standard.  For example an ISDN card could bridge to a Digium T1 card.
> Or a card that supported legacy digital phones could bridge to other
> cards.

That is called H.100, and it has existed for many years. It's also
ludicrously expensive to implement, so you won't see it on Digium cards
any time soon :-)